Maggie Gyllenhaal Says She’s Not the Best Cook, But Jake “Has a Gift”

As part of its fall fête on Wednesday, the Lunchbox Fund introduced an app called “Feedie” with which users may donate simply by snapping photos of their meals at participating restaurants. The organization, which provides meals for needy South African schoolchildren, has found a way to dedicate New York’s food-porn craze to a higher cause.

“I think people want to do good, and it’s so easy to do good with this one,” said Maggie Gyllenhaal, a co-chair of the event, held at Buddakan in Chelsea. The actress admitted between laughs that she herself sometimes photographs her meals.

“The last time I did it was at the River Café, in London,” she said. “Because I had been working super hard in London. It was my Friday night. I had worked super-long days—really, really hard—and I went out to dinner. I had gotten kind of dressed up. I had just been eating catering on the movie, just barely eating dinner. And there was this beautiful meal. It looked so good. There was some kind of ceremony about it. I just went, ‘Wait, wait, before we eat it, I just want to take a picture.’”

When she’s not on a movie set, Gyllenhaal says she cooks dinner herself most nights, at home, where she struggles to maintain order in her kitchen.

“Being organized is difficult for me, really difficult for me, but I value it,” she told VF Daily. “So I slave to be organized. I slave to clean up. It doesn’t come easily to me, but I try.”

She says her osso buco is pretty good, but her culinary skills are just O.K. “I’m not amazing,” Gyllenhaal explained. “My brother is an amazing cook; he has a gift. I’m not. I cook things for the first time, and they come out terribly, often. But then the second and third times, you know, they’re pretty good,” she added, laughing.

The gala, a fun and relaxed evening at which works by artists like Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, Michael Stipe, Jim Dine, and Timothy Greenfield Sanders were auctioned off, featured a live musical performance and, of course, delicious snacks. Liv Tyler, Mario Batali, Salman Rushdie and Elettra Weidemann, and Joaquin Phoenix and his sisters, Rain and Summer, attended. David Blaine, who has an upcoming TV special, showed off some tricks. (This VF Daily correspondent still has the 10 of hearts—a card we were instructed to think of but not reveal. Inexplicably, it ended up folded in quarters underneath our watchstrap.)

Blaine was excited about his newly discovered love of cooking. “This is the truth,” he told VF Daily. “I was always terrible at it, and recently I started becoming obsessed with it. I was trying to watch my weight, and I was getting so concerned about every ingredient, so I decided it’s probably better to just do it myself.”

His repertoire, for now, is rather limited. “Now I can only make salmon and kale salad,” Blaine said laughing. “But it’s so good!